If Mary Glazier's claim, that Palin joined her prayer-warfare group
almost two decades ago, is true it raises the possibiity that Sarah Palin personally participated in a 1995 campaign to drive an alleged "witch" out of Alaska.
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At two key points bracketing most of 2008 GOP vice-presidential Candidate Sarah Palin's meteoric rise to political prominence, we find Palin tied to self-described witch-hunters. Not one, but two.
That alone is striking enough but Sarah Palin is also closely associated with an insurgent religious movement, within Christianity, whose members claim to cure crime and addiction by casting out demons, both from individuals and from whole geographic areas, and by hounding accused witches out of cities, towns, and U.S. states.
Both of Palin's witch-hunters are also directors, one in Alaska, the other in East Africa, of the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, originally founded as the "Spiritual Warfare Network", which in turn constitutes a key network in the religious movement, known as The New Apostolic Reformation.
One of Palin's two witch hunters has publicly stated, in a July 13, 2008 recorded address [see video, below], that Sarah Palin is in the Alaska "spiritual warfare" prayer network and thus Palin appears to be tied into to a U.S. and international "spiritual warfare" network, The Global Apostolic Prayer Network, which claims that a planetary-level demon spirit blocks prayers of Catholics from reaching Heaven and whose top members boast of possibly having helped kill Mother Theresa through prayer-warfare.
[below: 73 second video documents Palin-endorser Thomas Muthee's anti-Catholic bigotry]
Among Palin's two witch hunters, Thomas Muthee, has received moderate media scrutiny. The other, Mary Glazier, has gone almost wholly unnoticed but if Glazier's claim, that Palin joined her prayer-warfare group
almost two decades ago, is true, it would raise the possibiity that Sarah Palin has herself personally participated in a witch-hunt.
American media has lavished considerable attention on Sarah Palin's undeniable association with internationally famous African evangelist Thomas Muthee, who anointed and blessed Sarah Palin as a political leader, during Palin's bid for the Alaska governor's seat, in a strange religious ritual held at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in Wasilla, Alaska.
[below: 10 minute video explores Sarah Palin's association with Thomas Muthee]
During the October 16, 2005 Wasilla Assembly of God ceremony, Muthee called upon God to protect Sarah Palin against "spirits of witchcraft". When the gripping footage of the elaborate October 16, 2006 religious ceremony, which had been scrubbed from the Wasilla Assembly of God web site, later popped up later on the web site of an independent alternative Internet news web site, reporters and journalists noticed Internet accounts of one of Thomas Muthee's more colorful vocations, fighting "witches".
But amidst the media coverage that followed, of Palin's tie to a man who claims to have caused rates crime and addiction in a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya by, according to Muthee, hounding out of town an elderly Christian woman Muthee had accused of "witchcraft", mainstream reporters and journalists on the story failed to notice a crucial detail that surfaced in a report by Associated Press writer Garance Burke, As governor, Palin at times bonds church and state, which traced Palin's abuse of power from her brief time as Governor of Alaska back through her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska and noted Sarah Palin's participation in a church-led effort "to stop the local hospital from performing abortions" :
Records of her mayoral correspondence show that Palin worked arduously to organize a day of prayer at city hall. She said that with local ministers' help, Wasilla - a city of 7,000 an hour's drive north of Anchorage - could become "a light, or a refuge for others in Alaska and America."
"What a blessing that the Lord has already put into place the Christian leaders, even though I know it's all through the grace of God," she wrote in March 2000 to her former pastor. She thanked him for the loan of a video featuring a Kenyan preacher who later would pray for her protection from witchcraft as she sought higher office.
That "Kenyan preacher" was Thomas Muthee and the video in question was one of George Otis , Jr.'s "Transformations" video, in which Muthee has played a key, starring role and which purport to show how Christians can transform society by casting out demons and banishing witches (in practice, the accused "witches" are often physically assaulted or killed and, as is becoming increasingly common in Africa, burned alive. Many of those accused of witchcraft in Africa are children. Furthermore, many of Muthee's claims appear to have been invented ( see Mama Jane Speaks! ).
Sarah Palin's thank-you note on the Transformations video she had borrowed in 2000 from her former Wasilla Assembly of God pastor indicates that on October 16, 2005, when Thomas Muthee blessed and anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God, that Palin knew exactly who Muthee was and what he represented. The note demonstrates beyond a reasonable level of doubt that Sarah Palin knowingly accepted a blessing, an anointing and a political endorsement from an internationally celebrated religious leader who claims that fighting "witchcraft" and casting out "spirits of witchcraft" and territorial demons can dramatically reduce crime, and addiction as well, and transform society.
In 2000 as well, Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin joined the advisory board of Carry the Cure, Inc., a 501c(3) religious nonprofit that has received public funds, conducts "suicide prevention" programs in school and declares, on its federal tax forms that its mission is "religious - evangelism".
In early 2008, Sarah Palin appointed the co-founder of Carry the Cure, Inc., Pat Donelson, to a seat on the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council, which makes recommendations on state suicide-prevention efforts and on use of state suicide prevention grant funds. Parent ministry to "Carry the Cure", Northwind Global Ministries, which Donelson directs, promotes leaders, such as Todd Bentley, recently the subject of a Southern Poverty Law Center story, 'Arming' for Armageddon, by researcher Casey Sanchez. Todd Bentley promote most extreme strain of New Apostolic Reformation theology, especially the idea that an end-time army of young, last-generation Christians armed with supernatural powers will conquer and "purify" the Earth. Northwind Global Ministries promotes the claim that Christians can learn to perform miracles, and miracle-healings, and raise the dead. Sarah Palin is still currently listed as serving on the advisory board of Carry The Cure.
[below: Max Blumenthal's 10-minute video documentary, "In The Land Of Queen Esther: The Unauthorized Sarah Palin Story", with live footage from the Wasilla Assembly of God church where Thomas Muthee "anointed" Sarah Palin on October 16, 2005. Video includes secretly taped footage of Muthee's September 20, 2008 return to the Wasilla church, in which Muthee inveighs against "spirits of witchcraft" and "python spirits" and an unnamed Russia pastor talks about "stepping on the heads of the enemy" ]
Palin's other witch hunter : Mary Glazier
If mainstream media failed to connect the dots tying Palin to Muthee and his witch-hunting ideology, at least it noticed that a Palin-Muthee existed in the first place. But, mainstream journalists and reporters wholly utterly failed to notice accounts circulating on the Internet, which tied Sarah Palin to a second witch hunter who was, in fact, indigenous to Alaska: Mary Glazier.
[below: video with audio excerpts from Mary Glazier's July 13, 2008 address in which Glazier stated that Sarah Palin had joined Glazier's prayer group, then based in Wasilla, when Glazier was 24 yerar's old. Audio excerpt starts approx. 45 seconds into video]
On July 13, 2008, at a conference held at a church in Everett, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, Mary Glazier told top leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation that at the age of twenty four, a young Wasilla, Alaska woman had joined Glazier's prayer group which was later to become the Alaska "spiritual warfare network". Mary Glazier is the Alaska Director of the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, originally founded in 1990 as the "Spiritual Warfare Network".
In a one-hour sermon during which Mary Glazier told attendees of the July 12-14, 2008 "Bringing Heaven To Earth" conference about her prayer-warfare group's efforts towards the election of Alaska Independence Party candidate Walter E. Hickel to the Alaska governor's seat, Glazier described her association with Sarah Palin:
"We began to shake that Gate of government. Father you said this is what you are going to do. We have to have a Christian Governor to have this happen. And by a miracle he won by a write-in campaign by a landslide.
But while we were praying for him there was a twenty-four year old woman that God began to speak to about entering into politics.She became a part of our prayer group out in Wasilla.
Years later, became the mayor of Wasilla. And last year was elected Governor of the state of Alaska.
Yes! Hallelujah!
At her inauguration she dedicated the state to Jesus Christ.
Hallelujah!"
On October 22, 2008, Sarah Palin appeared on Focus on The Family head Dr. James Dobson's personal radio show, and Palin thanked "opur prayer warriors" around the nation:
James Dobson:
Well, I want to tell you I'm one of those great fans too, and I just want you to know that Shirley and I are praying for you, for your safety, and for your health, and that God's perfect will will be done on November the fourth.
Shirley just had a prayer event here, she's Chairman of the National Day of Prayer and we had 430 people here for the weekend. They prayed for
the whole weekend. It was not a political event but we were sure asking for God's intervention.Sarah Palin:
Well, it is that intercession that is so needed, and so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too Dr. Dobson, I can feel the power of prayer and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation, and I so appreciate it.
Although the terms 'intercessory prayer' and 'prayer warrior' are widely used in Christianity, Sarah Palin has been been claimed, as a member, by one very specific and well defined prayer-warfare network: the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, formerly called the "Spiritual Warfare Network". This 'prayer warfare' network considers Catholics, and everyone else who does not share its particular interpretation of Christianity to be under demon influence and damned to hell; it hunts witches and is mapping out "demon influences" in cities and towns across America.
Global Apostolic Prayer Network leaders compare Catholicism to Freemasonry and have conducted prayer warfare which they claim may have helped to kill Mother Theresa. One top leader and apostle of this spiritual warfare movement endorses the activities of church-based Central American death squads.
On September 6, 2008, Norwegian Spiritual Warfare leader Jan-Aage Torp confirmed that Sarah Palin was currently a 'prayer warrior' in Mary Glazier's prayer-warfare network.
Glazier has claimed that in 1995 her network drove an employee of the Alaska State Prison System, whom Glazier had accused of witchcraft, out of Alaska with 'spiritual warfare'. As Glazier told Spiritled Woman Magazine,
"As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer."
*********************
BACKGROUND
[background for those who are curious and unfamiliar with this story]
The New Apostolic Reformation
From her entrance into local town politics in Wasilla, Alaska to Palin's successful bid for the Alaska governor's seat, the arc of Sarah Palin's political career has been punctuated by Palin's association, unusual in the 20th Century but which also probably would have raised eyebrows had Palin been a Nineteenth Century politician, with the witch-hunting and demon-expelling obsessed religious movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. That movement is not significant for its promotion of glossolalia or other affectations of charismatic Christianity. As I wrote in a recent op-ed :
Sarah Plain's churches matter : not because people at Plain's churches speak in tongues or for any specific gestural or behavioral expression. These things are deeply felt and not properly mocked or stigmatized, Rather, Plain's churches matter because pastors in those churches espouse an aggressive form of Christian nationalism and also the doctrine that all forms of religious and philosophical beliefs other than their own are invalid and even under demonic influence.
Christians caught up in the Third Wave or New Apostolic Reformation tend to believe that all Christian sects and denominations are invalid and even under demonic influence because their theological substrate holds that when Adam and Eve sinned in The Garden, God withdrew his protective cover from the Earth and demons flooded in. Plain's churches are demon-haunted churches which tend to view the Catholic Church (especially) as well as all Protestant denominations as invalid and as manifestations of a "religious spirit" that's held to be demonic. Things devolve from there - the Third Wave stigmatizes much of Protestant and Catholic Christianity but it vilifies and literally demonizes Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and all non-Christian religions and belief systems as manifestations of "witchcraft", to be driven from the Earth by "spiritual warfare" and by a physical, end-time, purifying last-generation army.
As a Monday, October 20, 2008 report, Killing Mother Theresa With Their Prayers from the New Apostolic Reformation Research Group (of which I am a member) explains,
[the New Apostolic Reformation] is no fringe movement, but a rapidly institutionalizing entity larger than most Protestant denominations. The leadership has forged this movement from several strands of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, often referred to as the Third Wave. ; under the Convening Apostle, C. Peter Wagner, they have formed an international entity encompassing thousands of independent, Pentecostal, and Charismatic churches worldwide, as well as hundreds of cross-denominational para-church organizations, their own educational and accreditation systems, conventions, media, and businesses.
The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has rapidly grown since the Himalayan venture, largely through a widely successful media campaign conducted by the Sentinel Group. The media group, led by George Otis, Jr., uses a series of videos referred to as the "Transformations" series to promote their ideas of societal transformation through the expulsion of demons. Since the 1999 release of their first video, "Transformations," the combined forces of the NAR and The Sentinel Group have promoted the ultimate faith-based initiative - "transformation" through spiritual warfare and religious, ideological, and social cleansing.
The "documentaries" demonstrate the process through which communities and nations around the world have been transformed through spiritual mapping, and the expulsion of "strategic level territorial demons" and generational curses. ;The portrayed result is the creation of mini-utopias which provide confirmation and glimpses of the coming glories of the "Kingdom" when other religious systems have been defeated. Once the witches and demons are purged and the communities are led by "Spirit-filled" Christians ( some advertised as 92% saved), the videos document the amazing results: empty jails and reduction in crime, repair of environmental degradation and increased crop yields including huge vegetables, bars turned to churches, improved schools, miraculous large-scale healings of AIDs, ; and purging of corruption from government.
The videos are viewed at churches and ministries around the world, recently advertised as having been viewed by 200 million people in 70 languages.
One of the stars of Tranformations is none other than the famous witch hunter - Thomas Muthee. ;Muthee was well known internationally, long before the anointing ceremony of Sarah Palin. Transformations I features his recently debunked story of transforming Kiambu, Kenya from a crime-ridden hellhole to a peaceful oasis, through the expulsion of a witch called Mama Jane.
Muthee has subsequently held leadership roles including serving as a board member of the World Prayer Center International, and currently as a Transformations Associate. ; part of this Transformations "franchise" effort of the combined media, organizations, ministries, and businesses, has been a massive campaign to de-Catholicize Central and South America, glimpses of which can also be seen in the videos. ; other significant international impact has resulted from their promotion of their claimed miraculous healing of AIDS in Uganda. ; they have been particularly successful with their operations in Guatemala, Argentina, and Brazil. Muthee is not just another witch hunter.
But the "Transformations" franchise of evangelism and demon hunting is not just operating in Africa or South America. ;The Transformations movement has impacted American social and governmental policy. ;The idea that social transformation can be achieved through spiritual warfare, and the expulsion of demons and witchcraft, is becoming deeply embedded in social and government policy in the United States including emergency response, physical and mental health, public safety, and juvenile and adult rehabilitation
Documentation: Supporting Articles and Videos
The following are links to articles and videos that have been posted on Talk2action.org in an ongoing series, documenting the research on Sarah Plain's Churches and the Third Wave. They are listed in chronological order with the latest articles first. Below the links is a brief overview of the New Apostolic Reformation.
Killing Mother Theresa with their Prayers
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/10/20/195730/89/
Palin and the Apostles
Fishers and Hunters - The Continuing Saga of Christian Zionism
A Heartbeat Away or Why Palin's Churches Matter
Buzzflash Interview with the Palin Churches Research Team
In Video, Pastor Annoints Palin, Urges "Infiltration" of Schools, Government, Business
The "Lions in the Pews"
Palin, Muthee, and the Witch- Journalists Miss the Major Story
YouTube Censors Viral Video Documentary on Plain's Churches
Palin's Churches and the Holy Laughter Anointing,
Video, Documentation, and Article
Sarah Palin's Demon Haunted Churches, Complete Edition
With videos, documentation , and article
Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave, Part Two
Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave, Part One
Videos
Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave, also titled
Palin's Demon Haunted Churches
Plain's Churches and the Holy Laughter Anointing
Palin, Muthee and Killing Mother Theresa
Palin Anointer Thomas Muthee Fights Catholics, Witches and Python Spirits.
In Short: The New Apostolic Reformation and the Third Wave
The New Apostolic Reformation is a recently institutionalized Protestant sect that emerged from specific Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, sometimes referred to collectively as the Third Wave. These are revivals of a 1940s and 1950s movement named as a heresy by the Assemblies of God at that time. The New Apostolic Reformation can now be defined as a distinct movement with a unique theology. The central figure in the movement, C. Peter Wagner has organized the sect structure and defined its primary theology. He declared 2001 as the beginning of the new Apostolic Age. Wagner's extensive Apostolic network includes 500 Apostles from the U.S. and 42 other countries, each with their own network of churches and ministries, some with hundreds or even thousands. This network is interconnected with other Apostolic networks around the world who share media, conferences, schools, and training, and revivals.
The major tenets of the adherents of this sect include the belief that we are living in the final years before the return of Christ. However, they differ from other Fundamentalist Protestants in their belief that they must defeat evil on the earth and purify the existing churches before Jesus can return. Furthermore, the building of this "Kingdom of God" is not to be delayed until after the Rapture, or to be built in a heavenly sphere. They believe that they have a mandate to build the Kingdom in the present and in the physical realm. In preparation for this task, this final generation is being "imparted" with special supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit that will allow them to wage spiritual warfare and take control of the earth from the devil and an array of demons. The mandate for building the Kingdom includes their current Seven Mountains strategy for the taking control over government, arts and entertainment, media, education, family, religion, and business.
This effort includes extensive mission work around the globe featuring their well developed spiritual warfare strategies which have been published in books and videos. The goal of these spiritual warfare tactics is to take cities and communities from the territorial demons that control theses geographic areas and that they believe prevent their efforts in planting their own Apostolic churches. Spiritual warfare around the globe includes the goal of taking control of cities through the expulsion of witches and demons, and the conversion of Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and all other religions. They also believe that there must be a civil war in the Protestant church during this "Third Reformation" in order for them to purify that institution before Jesus can return. The movement has an extensive focus on youth, with several leaders specifically prophesying that those born after 1973 are to be the trainers and warriors for God's army.